Archie in Hell #1
Writer: Patrick Horvath
Artist: Tyler Crook
Colorist: Francesco Segala
Publisher: Oni Press
Many teens refer to high school as Hell.
Archie Andrews is about to learn just how true that can be...
The Price of Virtue
Riverdale, Saturday morning. Archie’s mom is surprised to find her son up and dressed so early. He's got a busy day planned: picking up donations for the "Reach Out Riverdale" food drive (that no one else seems to have heard of), dropping them off, going to a matinee showing of a movie with Betty, and going to a later movie with Veronica (which Betty knows about—stupid Reggie)...
As Archie runs around town picking up donations and checking on his friends, we cut over to Greendale. Here Sabrina Spellman is conducting her weekly cleanse, which reveals that an apocalypse cult called the Order of A'ldarax is nearby and looking for a virtuous teenager to sacrifice to their Elder Gods...
Hey, you don't suppose...
Uh-oh.
Spike the Punch
I've said many times before that I'm not the biggest horror fanatic. However, that doesn't mean I can't appreciate a well-done spooky tale—and Archie Comics has several, like Afterlife with Archie and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. So to say I was excited for Archie in Hell is an understatement.
For me, this issue lived up to the hype.
The best stories, horror or otherwise, spend time establishing the characters and the stakes before everything goes off the rails. That's what the creative team does here—by starting off with Archie visiting each of his friends to get their donations, we get a clear idea of who each character is and what they're all about. It also establishes just what everyone has to lose.
Intercut with the Riverdale wholesomeness, our time with Sabrina in Greendale begins building the tension by revealing the existence of the cult and the threat they pose. Even though Aunts Zelda and Hilda brush them off as no real threat, Sabrina knows that Riverdale is the perfect place for them to find the pure and virtuous teen they've been searching for.
Speaking of that teen, he gives us our first concrete glimpse of the horrors that await when he stops at Mister Weatherbee's house. The principal doesn't answer his door, which Archie and Jughead assume means that he just didn't want to deal with students on the weekend. But if they had actually entered the house to check on him, they would have found his headless body, which was bound to a chair and then stuffed in a hall closet...
The scenes when the cult finally gets hold of Archie are when the issue goes full horror. When the teen arrives at the location of the food drive (a run-down old gas station with a handwritten banner reading "Reach Out Riverdale"—get a clue, Arch), he is immediately gassed and knocked unconscious. Maybe he should have ignored the spam texts about the food drive as everyone else did?
When Archie comes to, he's strapped to a crucifix with arcane symbols all over his body. One of the cultists has some sort of creature literally crawl out of his mouth and vomit something into Mister Weatherbee's severed head, which has been turned into the worst punchbowl ever. Things just get worse from there.
Sabrina intervenes, but is she too late? Is there a way to save Archie, and is the cure worse than the disease?
As you can tell, this gets pretty wild and gnarly by the end. I actually hated spoiling so much of it here, but the title of the book has the word Hell in it, so I think it's a given that there's not going to be a happy ending at this point.
At first I questioned why this book was released the week after Halloween, but I think I understand now. We really needed to have the new Archie and Sabrina books launch first, so that anyone who wasn't familiar with the characters got a chance to see them in their more classic forms before putting them together in this crazy horror tale. As I said earlier, you have to get to know the characters and the stakes before things go off the rails.
That's definitely what this issue does the best: it's a slow burn without feeling slow, it's character-driven without feeling boring. It knows the story it wants to tell, and it's confident in its ability to do so.
Without spoiling the cliffhanger, I do have to admit that when I saw the title Archie in Hell, I thought we were going to get the traditionally Biblical take on it, with fire, brimstone, and demons. But it looks like the creative team is taking a different tack instead, and I'm excited to see how it plays out.
Creeping Death
I have to admit, I have not read Patrick Horvath’s best-known work, Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees. So I really had no idea what to expect from his writing. I came away impressed and am definitely going to check his other book out ASAP. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I think the best thing he does here is the slow build. The early portions could easily be a standard Archie story—he’s trying to do something good, but he’s also dating two girls at the same time—but the sinister undertones are there. And when they explode to the surface, well, that’s when Horvath’s horror pedigree really shows through.
Tyler Crook does much the same on art—the characters have just enough of the classic look, albeit a bit more realistic overall—and the horror elements are truly gnarly. The creature that crawls out of a cultist’s mouth is very Lovecraftian, which is of course the first place my mind went when I heard “cult that worships Elder Gods.” Even the effects of Sabrina’s spells are much more horrific than we’re used to seeing.
Francesco Segala’s colors have their own part to play in this horror tale. Much like the tone of the story itself, they’re much brighter and sunnier at the start, then slowly get darker and more sinister as the truth of the story is revealed. By the time we reach the ritual, everything is washed in shades of red and black that give the proceedings an unnatural look.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Archie in Hell #1 lets you spend plenty of time with the wholesome, virtuous (well, except for the two-timing) teens of Riverdale before it pulls the rug out and hits you with Lovecraftian cults. Archie is no stranger to being put in strange situations, but he usually has his pals by his side. This time, he’s all alone, and I think more than any of the actual horrors he’s likely to face, that’s where the true terror of this series lies.